Every year on January 1, a quirky crowd of adventurers storms out across North America for a spectacularly competitive event called a Big Year – a grand, grueling, expensive, and occasionally vicious, "extreme" 365-day marathon of birdwatching. For three men in particular, 1998 would be a whirlwind, a winner-takes-nothing battle for a new North American birding record. In frenetic pilgrimages for once-in-a-lifetime rarities that can make or break their lead, the birders race each other from Del Rio, Texas, in search of the rufous-capped warbler, to Gibsons, British Columbia, on a quest for Xantus's hummingbird, to Cape May, New Jersey, seeking the offshore great skua.

The Second World War surpassed all previous wars in the sheer cost of many millions of lives, most of them civilian. It left a world reeling from physical destruction on a scale never experienced till then, and from the psychological traumas of loss, of imprisonment and genocide, and permanent exile from home.

Germany and the Second World War - Vol. VII - The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia, 1943-1945Clarendon Press | 2006 | ISBN: 0198228899 | English | 931 pages | PDF | 13 MB

Joyce Ffoulkes Parry was an Australian nurse who came to Britain in 1937 to rediscover her Welsh roots. When war was declared, she signed up as a Queen Alexandra nurse and from 1940 until 1944, when she left India to begin her married life in Wales, she served as a sister in France, on hospital ships and in hospitals in Egypt, India and the Far East.